Caroline Hu Spring 2023 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Even when they’re just hanging on a rack, there’s something wistful and touching about Caroline Hu’s clothes: hand-pleating as fine as the gills of a mushroom and intricate smocking, sometimes spliced with scraps of lace and other fabrics salvaged from the cutting table, carry an emotional charge, like they’re yearning for something. On one dress, a blurred print of birds in flight imparts all the nostalgia of a sepia-tone photo, though it’s not a photo at all. The designer, an artist and ceramist in her spare time, painted what she saw out the window from her bed in Shanghai during all those months stranded in lockdown.

Hu said that her inspirations are always rooted in her emotions. For spring, sadness and the feeling of being let down after her last show, which featured a short and intense collaboration with dancers, were her baseline. ”We had tried to put together this beautiful story, and afterward I just felt a little sad because everyone went back to their normal life,” she explained. In her spring collection notes, she added: “As the tide of life, the stage welcomed a blank period. This is love.” That explains, in part, why part of a dress might be left unadorned, like a work in progress.

Juggling two registers—with 21 couture pieces and about as many ready-to-wear looks—the designer transposed her paintings into prints for crop tops or dresses in delicately worked smocking. A more conceptual dress reprised a sculpture as wide, sinuous columns of densely sewn pleats. “I always try to redefine and figure out what might be artistic yet still commercial,” Hu said of a light top and skirt with no discernable seams. “And I’m always trying to make shapes with no traditional lines that will look great on the body. Fabric or ceramics are just different tools for me to express my artistic work.”

Hu’s opinion on whether fashion is art may vary from one season to the next, but several industry players have already made up their minds: the French lacemaker Sophie Hallette regularly sends Hu stock overrun to use in her designs, and for spring Ugg invited Hu to romanticize its classic footwear. Wherever that leads, it will be worth following.